Is PSA opening a base at DFW anytime soon?

 

Nope. I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Were starting to do a few turns in and out of there, but nothing more than that. I mean it’s possible in a few years I suppose. From a pilot level understanding of the airline business it would make logical sense if one day AA decided to cancel the contract with Mesa, but I don’t think we’d have the staffing for it right now.

 

With 1900 pilots and not even 150 airframes yet, I don’t think staffing is an issue.


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Probably depends on if AA wants to give that contract to them instead of Mesa in the future.

 

Asked of PSA President at recent meeting and specifically denied for near term. He expressed a hope that psa could earn some Dfw flying and a base in the future.

Current Dfw expansion is a scheduling trick to move more airframes through psa maintenance bases

 

Having this place go critical when it sprinkles in CLT or DC might suggest otherwise, as would my hellish reserve experience last month.

Mesa has a huge number of air frames in DFW (aka The Mothership) There’s no way we’re could pick up all that flying, at least not overnight. We’d have to have at least 200 CA and FO’s (400 total) to come close to what would be needed to replace the Mesa flying.

 

You know there's a PSA sub-forum where all these threads you've started would fit nicely.

 

 

I somewhat agree, but the biggest problem is we have so many reserves in our outstations and they’re rendered basically useless when poop hits the fan in the hubs since the company can’t get them into the hubs efficiently. I think the company just declares critical in all the bases hoping some of the pilots live near the hubs and might be willing to help out. When CLT and DCA shut down I’d estimate there’s 100-300 reserves in the outstations that don’t even get used even when they declare critical in all bases.

Also, Mesa currently is staffed for about 8 pilots for every airplane on property. PSA is around 14.2.

If AAG sent half of Mesa’s airplanes to PSA and none of their pilots came with them we would still be better staffed than Mesa is with their current operation. We would then have 9 pilots per airplane. At PSA’s current hiring pace I’d say it’s reasonable to assume we could reach 2300 total pilots by early spring 2020. With those numbers and a combined Mesa and PSA fleet we’d be staffed around 7.6 pilots per airplane. Not that I think anything that drastic is going to happen, but if AAG wanted it done it wouldn’t take much more of an effort from current hiring trends.

 

The two contacts require two different numbers of pilots per plane for the operation to function.